I'm the guy who bought 259684 BTC for under $3000 yesterday (2011)

https://web.archive.org/web/20110716064544/https://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=20207.0

by ca98am79 • 5 years ago

88 80 5 years ago

web.archive.org

alex_young• 5 years ago

Should say [2011]

tartoran• 5 years ago

Yep. And probably sold it when he doubled his money

paulpauper2• 5 years ago

sure he still has a lot left

caseyross• 5 years ago

(2011)

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2676263

And 2 years later: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6817095

nomoreplease• 5 years ago

Tangent: have the MtGox lawsuits finished? It seemed the main personas are bound to secrecy until they conclude, but that there is a lot of incorrect speculation on what happened in the collapse

koboll• 5 years ago

I'd like to get my $10 of Bitcoin back. Could buy a decent car with it now.

elif• 5 years ago

In that case, it could be in your best interest for the court case to last a decade, when you can buy a decent beach house.

vessenes• 5 years ago

Nope! Still ongoing in Tokyo district court.

I worked with Fortress 2019-2021 to get a deal for creditors to have an early out, though. The Trustee agreed to give creditors a rapid exit option in December of 2020, and scheduled the vote for the ‘quick’ exit for .. wait for it.. October 2021. If creditors approve that plan, then they’ll have an option for an early payout. I have no idea what quick means to Kobayashi though, given that the bankruptcy has taken like 7 years at this point.

pakitan• 5 years ago

Don't try to paint yourself as the good guy, Peter Vessenes. You may be able to bamboozle someone who is not familiar with the process but not me. The "option for an early payout" is not something to be proud of. Your company Coinlab, with the ridiculous, meritless, $16 BILLION claim, engineered with the sole purpose to block payments to creditors, so you can extort us, is the sole reason we will not be able to get the full amount that is owed to us, once the voting is done. Instead, we'll be forced to take a 10% cut if we want to take the "early payout".

Don't put this on the trustee. While he may not be moving at the speed we would like, he is following Japanese law and Japanese court orders. You, on the other hand, are a cunning extortionist, trying to get your hands on our money.

tinco• 5 years ago

Yet you kept this deal secret for those creditors, until the point where they had no option but to accept it. The reality of it is that you just colluded with Fortress to cheat the creditors out of millions.

zylstra• 5 years ago

Oh wow, is this for real? Peter Vessenes is the scum of the earth.

VikingCoder3• 5 years ago

259684 BTC * $46,222.60 BTC / USD = 12.0032697 billion USD

643.27 BTC * $46,222.60 BTC / USD = 29.7336119 million USD

floatingatoll6• 5 years ago

So if they still have those bitcoins, they're worth twelve billion dollars in theoretical value, assuming the market would cooperate.

It is unclear if the market would be able to execute a currency outflow of that size successfully without cratering value towards zero.

If they still have them, they could single-handedly demonstrate today whether the market can complete a currency exchange of this volume, and the outcome of the transaction would represent its maturity level at "one day of GDP" sized currency changes.

judge2020• 5 years ago

The smart thing to do is to pull $1m out every week or so - big exchanges have the capacity to do that much.

dillondoyle• 5 years ago

I'm no expert or BTC fanatic but it looks like daily volume today was ~$34BB equivalent. Sees reasonably plausible to cash out in 'small' chunks even 200mm

beaner• 5 years ago

Selling the Bitcoin for dollars rather than keeping the wealth as Bitcoin is the myth that still hampers most people's thinking.

paulpauper2• 5 years ago

The bitcoin market is huge , and also he could easily sell it in chunks OTC to hedge funds and other large buyers at a discount, and the funds in turn can report it as an instant mark to market profit. Or borrow against it. Tons of ways of turning it into cash. It's not like he would have to deposit it on binance and dump it at once.

omarhaneef2• 5 years ago

I think this was a question floating about when companies were putting a lot of BTC on their balance books.

Elon Musk said they sold some Bitcoin to test the liquidity and it was fine. I believe they sold 10% of their BTC which came to about $1B without much of an issue.

Here is Musk’s tweet about it:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1386821144037236737

It may not have been all at once — whatever that means — or even over a day but it seems you could get it out over weeks or months. They made the sale between quarters so it was a max of 3 months.

runawaybottle• 5 years ago

Large share holders in an ipo ditch their shares in a controlled way too so as not to tank the stock price. Why would Bitcoin be held to a higher test?

bitcoinmoney• 5 years ago

It will crash the market if somebody put a sell order like that.

hn_go_brrrrr• 5 years ago

No need to sell it all at once. Ten thousand here, ten thousand there...

ComputerGuru• 5 years ago

He only got to keep 600 BTC.

VikingCoder3• 5 years ago

Which is 29.7336119 million USD

xyst• 5 years ago

That’s the type of money that gets you 6 ft under in less than 1 year.

mensetmanusman3• 5 years ago

Such a good story for the history books of humanity’s first attempts at digital currency. It turns out we probably don’t have secure enough code logic or low enough clean power requirements to do crypto this century, but maybe next…

Overton-Window• 5 years ago

Within a decade BTC has gone from novelty to the 14th largest currency in the world: https://fiatmarketcap.com

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." ― Philip K. Dick

gowld• 5 years ago

"currency" is measured in "market cap" now?

imtringued3• 5 years ago

Why is that list missing gold?

mensetmanusman3• 5 years ago

Sure, BTC exists, and governments have an interest in keeping it going since there is great traceability, but a digital currency that you can use everyday and everywhere to but a Coke is probably still a ways out.

ww520• 5 years ago

Isn't Satoshi Nakamoto still holding like 1.5 millions BTC?

awill88• 5 years ago

They are so incredibly rich, end of discussion.

hoherd• 5 years ago

If this interests you, I recommend reading Jake Adelstein's short book Pay The Devil In Bitcoin.

stevage• 5 years ago

Wow, those 643 bitcoin, which were kind of the loose change in the story, are now worth more than the entire haul was at the time.

ChrisArchitect• 5 years ago

Something new to add to this since? A follow up? Anything?

If you have to dig up a Wayback copy of a post, this probably isn't news.

Some old discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6817095

grepfru_it• 5 years ago

During volatile moments in the past, I noticed bitfinex could not keep up with order processing and one could enter almost any number to buy and sell crypto. I would put a buy order in for a price 10% under ask and then immediately sell for 10% over the bid. I amassed a good chunk of coin during these times

I'm the guy who bought 259684 BTC for under $3000 yesterday (2011)

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